Contribution
A Satellite Essay
I want to be modest but clear about this: Artistic research, as I see it, is not in the business of revolutionary claims, much more it is in the business of articulating what practice knows, making visible the knowledge embedded in making, and offering that knowledge for discussion, critique, and use by others.
Here is what this research contributes.
A Documented Practice of Deconstruction and Reassembly
The arc of this research moved from startup through deconstruction to assemblage. That arc is not unique. Many artists move through similar phases. What this research offers is partly documentation, a detailed account of what it looks like to systematically take apart a practice, question its assumptions, and rebuild it differently, and partly a reflective body of work that hopefully sheds some light on the why and how.
I'm not saying that this will apply to everyone, but the example is available through this work. Someone facing a similar impasse, a similar need to rethink their practice from the ground up, might find something useful here; not as a template, more like a precedent, like I myself have used the works of others as precedents to this.
A Conceptual Distinction: Identity and Personality
The distinction between musical identity (multiple, emergent and performative) and personality (singular and continuous) is the conceptual core of this research. It's not a discovery. Many musicians intuitively understand that they contain multitudes, that they are different musical beings in different contexts, and yet that something persists across all that variation.
What this research contributes, then, is the articulation. Naming the distinction, situating it in theoretical frameworks (MacDonald et al., Butler, Deleuze), and demonstrating it through showing the fragmented practice leading into a finished artwork. And, like with everything belonging to the fluid and abstract domains, once named, the distinction becomes available. Both for use as a lens for understanding improvisation, collaboration, and the relationship between artistic roles, and for critique and re-analysis.
The Drift Engine as Procedural Agency
As I believe, and accept, that nothing is really new, I have to mention that the Drift Engine is not the first machine to participate in improvisation, and it's not even particularly sophisticated by current standards. What it offers is a specific instance of what I call procedural agency: a machine that participates in musical interaction without imitating human intention, becoming a tool that demands a relation.
The contribution is not the technology but the framing. Drift demonstrates that machines can have musical identity in an emergent, relational sense, that their contributions can be recognized and responded to as if they had voices, even though they lack consciousness or intention. This has many implications for how we think about human-machine collaboration in music and beyond, and in this particular case, on the album III, the main impact of the Drift Engine was in the hours prior to the actual recording, as mentioned elsewhere also, in total acting upon the musicians more like a catalyst than a productive tool.
Archival Listening as Method
The practice of engaging with one's own accumulated work as a resource for transformation, rather than a collection to be preserved, is transferable. I've called it archival listening and distinguished it from other uses of that term. The method is available for others to adapt, but you need to be aware that there is another definition of the word also. In the satellite text describing the method, this is explained clearly to avoid confusion.
More broadly, archival listening offers a way of thinking about creative accumulation. We don't start from zero. Our history shapes our possibilities. Archival listening makes that shaping explicit and usable.
The Result as Concept
Finally, this research demonstrates that the outcome of artistic research need not be reducible to a product. The album III and the live performance of it are both results, but neither are "the" result. They are two manifestations of a single conceptual outcome: music that arises from the interaction of multiple identities, human and machinic, in improvisational performance.
This framing matters because it resists the reduction of artistic research to a specific product. The product, rather, is evidence, not a final conclusion. The knowledge is in the practice, the process and the conceptual framing; the product makes it audible, the reflection makes the reasoning communicable.
To Whom It Matters
These contributions are fairly modest. They are articulations of things many musicians know implicitly but, to my knowledge, rarely name. Their value lies in the naming of them, like recording a sound before it disappears, the work here is making something abstract visible, making it discussable, and through that, making it available. I even made a song about it, titled Grab a hold, where everything comes from, and displays, the idea of seeing "it", then holding onto "it", then finishing "it". There's a video made for the Grieg Research School available in this presentation, as well as a finished track. Both of them are very straightforward examples of my process and method. The text is even a recipe, of sorts, that outlines the "makings of."
For practitioners this might be a precedent for navigating the tension between multiple artistic roles, and a set of methods that can be adapted, and for researchers it might function as a case study in practice-based inquiry, with detailed documentation of method, process, and reflection.
For the field as a whole it will largely depend on who encounters this, but like any research product it is a small addition to an ongoing conversation about identity, improvisation, and the possibilities of human-machine collaboration in music, and like with the music I, and anyone, make, it's impossible to know the impact it might have. Cobussen (2017) frames his own work on improvisation similarly: the goal is not to produce definitive answers but to offer "new ways of perceiving music making," opening alternative modes of listening rather than closing them down (p. 23). All I know is that it tries to fulfill the demands of a research project clearly outlined in various legal documentation, and I try to do that in a voice and a style that is my own.
References
Cobussen, M. (2017). The field of musical improvisation. Leiden University Press.
Jonas Sjøvaag University of Agder, 2025